Onbashira Matsuri, Nagano

The Onbashira Festival (Honored Pillars Festival) is a festival held every six years in the Lake Suwa area of Nagano, Japan. The purpose of the festival is to symbolically renew the four shrine buildings at the Suwa Grand Shrine by felling sixteen fir trees, preparing them as honored pillars and transporting them down a mountain to the shrine, where they are erected at the four corners of each building.

Festival participants ride the onbashira as they are slid down the mountain, dragged to the shrine, and raised, and the festival has the reputation of being the most dangerous in Japan due to the number of people regularly injured or killed while riding the logs.



Vimeo link

(thanks Cora)